What has joined your group so far?

I think about this a lot. I love the incremental steps that are on the table. However, just for the sake of perspective, I'm going to throw out a high level 2c on this.

My customers seem most confused by the sense of abstraction. On one hand, they want content that they can manicure with precision. They also want it to be responsive (thereby losing the manicured precision). And, they often want business logic such as, this widget or sidebar should only show in certain circumstances or on certain URLs.

Those are the 3 challenges that this UI needs to address.

content management without abstraction

content management with visual flexibility

content management with abstract business logic

For the first item, a visual frontend editor would be ideal. One where I see my page and i can drag elements wherever i want them.

This falls apart a little in the mobile context unless we have a breakpoint mode where we can adjust things in different breakpoints.

This gets completely crazy when we start talking about conditional business logic. At that point I imagine we'd need a modal with business logic configurations / queries or something.

Obviously, the problem is that we don't actually support front end widget/sidebar administration.

@peterchester I like this idea, and also meet a lot of WordPress users who find the disconnect between the abstract widget backend and the presentation on the front too fiddly.

I'd be interested in helping with a visual frontend editor for widgets. Since an edit-in-place approach is unlikely to work for most widgets, because many have complex settings, I propose a "flip to edit" approach:

Logged-in users with certain privileges would be able to flip widgets to edit them – the reverse side would contain all the settings for that widget. Potentially, widgets could be added and reordered from the front end, and this could be made to work on mobile too. Is that worth exploring? Should this be a separate plugin from the backend widget rethink?